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BY CAMILLA MORTENSEN
Un-Bearable
Mike Martell’s crusade to stop Oregon from trapping bears to death
PHOTO BY TRASK BEDORTHA
“M
Mike Martell wields a bear snare
y passion and love is hunting
hounds,” Mike Martell says. He
spent 42 years as a houndsman
chasing “bears, cougars, everything.”
For years he used his hounds to haze bears out of
southern Oregon vineyards, until it became illegal to
hunt cougar and bear with hounds in this state. Martell
didn’t always kill the bears his hounds chased. The
goal was to get them out of the wineries where, he
says, one bear can eat its weight in grapes — and that
can be 400 or 500 pounds — in a night. Bear damage
to trees can hurt timber production, too, he says.
Now he says bears are trapped instead, and suffer
before being killed.
Martell says he’s got more in common with
conservationists than he does with the Oregon
Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) when it
comes to hunting. The Sweet Home resident has taken
his show on the road, he says, with a painful-looking
steel bear snare in hand, to criticize the way agencies
such as ODFW and the USDA’s Wildlife Services
indiscriminately and often cruelly kill the animals he
loves to chase.
“For the lack of a better word,” Martell says, “I’ve
had a gutful.”
He brings with him two snares, one that’s new, and
one that was nearly shredded by a bear’s desperate
struggles to free itself. The snares are triggered by a
metal trap that springs up and fl ings the loop around a
bear’s limb. The metal loop is fastened up high, so the
bear can’t leverage it loose. Martell says the bear will
fi ght the snare instead, digging the fraying metal cord
deeper and deeper into its limb. He cheerfully offers to
let people drop the loop around their own wrists to get
an inkling of how that might feel.
Current Oregon laws have no check requirement
for black bear traps, so a bear can be caught and suffer
for days before the trapper returns to shoot it. Or if the
snare catches a different animal instead of the bear it is
set for, that animal suffers and often dies.
If he were to haze or even kill a bear with hounds,
Martell says, a hunter can make sure he gets the right
bear — he can take his dogs right to the tree that’s
been damaged to pick up the scent. The only bears
he’s ever had to kill, which is rare, “I waited til I had
the culprits,” he says.
Ballot Measure 18 in 1994 banned the hunting
of bear and cougar with hounds and, Martell
argues, has ironically led to more bears being killed
indiscriminately.
Martell has pulled together numbers to back up
his claims. According to his data from the 2010-
2011 seasons, Wildlife Services killed 663 bears,
landowners and their agents killed 290, ODFW killed
114 and the Oregon State police killed eight. Of those
1,075 bears killed, 31 were classifi ed as “unknown.”
From 2005-2009 his data shows Wildlife Services
killed 744 bears and 42 of them were also unknown,
meaning it’s not clear if the bear was a female, male,
a cub or “sub adult.” The last, according to Martell, is
pretty much an older cub.
He questions why so many “unknown” bears are
killed, and how many cubs and young bears are killed
without being reported. “One unknown animal is one
animal too many,” he says. “I’m sick and tired of
snares.”
Martell says when it comes to trapping, “a bear
steps in a trap, a bear gets shot. A sow with cubs steps
in it, they all get shot.”
ODFW released its draft Black Bear Management
Plan in March. This is the fi rst update to the plan
since 1998, and it was released after southern Oregon
conservation group Big Wildlife threatened to sue
ODFW for failing to update the plan. Big Wildlife
believes the numbers of bears in Oregon are dropping
due to overkill by sport hunters and the killing of
“nuisance” bears.
Martell says, “This is not management; this
is slaughtering animals,” adding, “If this is game
management, I’ll eat my hat.”
Oregon’s spring bear hunting season started April
1 and runs through May 31. Last year 488 bears were
reported to ODFW as killed by hunters during spring
season.
Comments will be taken on the plan through the
June 7-8 ODFW meeting in Salem. It is available at
wkly.ws/1a0 and comments can be emailed to ODFW.
comments@state.or.us
Predator Defense, a local conservation group not affi liated with Martell
— it is in fact against hunting with hounds — will be bringing a husky
mix named Bella to Ninkasi’s “Pints for a Cause” Monday, May 14.
Bella lost her leg in a government snare in a national forest.
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EUGENE WEEKLY MAY 10, 2012
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